Passionate letters Roy Jenkins' male lover wrote to try to halt his marriage: More startling revelations about the VERY permissive love life of Labour's father of the permissive society

As the Labour Home Secretary who oversaw the legalisation of abortion and homosexuality, Roy Jenkins has been dubbed the father of the permissive society. Now, an astonishing new biography reveals his own very permissive private life. On Saturday, the first of our exclusive extracts laid bare his affairs with the wives of his two best friends. Today, we disclose his passionate fling with a man who became a close Cabinet colleague.

Arriving at Oxford University from lowly Abersychan County School in South Wales in 1938, Roy Jenkins acquired a new accent — that distinctive and rather posh drawl that was to be the delight of impressionists in years to come. His ‘Rs’ came out as ‘Ws’, and the sound he made was such that a fellow undergraduate took him for an Old Etonian peer’s son.

It wasn’t the only significant change in him. The miner’s son brushed up against young men from public schools, most notably Tony Crosland — ‘the most exciting friend of my life’ — with whom he would be intimately entangled for the next 38 years in a relationship that was both personal and political.

The young Crosland was a striking figure, 15 months older than Jenkins and a year ahead of him at Oxford. He was from the Home Counties, his father a senior civil servant, his mother an academic.

‘Tony was immensely good-looking and elegant,’ Jenkins recalled. ‘He wore a long camel-hair overcoat, and drove a powerful MG sports car known as the Red Menace. I found him rather intimidating, until he came to my rooms on some minor Labour Club business and remained talking for nearly two hours. Thereafter, I saw him nearly every day.’

Crosland at this time in his life was openly gay — it was part of his slightly dangerous glamour — and part of Roy’s attraction for him was probably sexual. There is a strong homoerotic undercurrent in his letters. Years later, Roy confessed that Tony had successfully seduced him at least once.

As Home Secretary in the Sixties, Jenkins would become a driving force behind the decriminalisation of homosexuality, but he himself was not by nature gay — far from it, as his string of mistresses later in life showed. But he fell for a time so wholly under Crosland’s spell that he might have tried anything.

In one of their first letters when both were at their respective homes in Pontypool and Sussex for Christmas, Crosland teasingly likened his ‘boy friend’ to a ‘handsome (& pansy) Beau Geste’ and warned him not to forget that ‘drink, women and sleep are all things to be taken in small quantities!’

In the early days of their relationship Jenkins was clearly the junior partner. The more confident Crosland embraced an upper-middle-class form of socialist politics that was at once cerebral and romantic, egalitarian and elitist.

Love triangle: Roy Jenkins' marriage to Jennifer Morris in 1945. He would later would become a driving force behind the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and despite the fling, he did not define himself as gay

Despite their ideological differences, they were still ‘exceedingly close’, with, as Crosland noted, an ‘intense friendship of a kind that neither of us are ever likely to experience again’.

They spent whole days together, had the same friends, ‘in fact practically shared our lives, in complete mutual absorption and complete mutual loyalty’.

Neither ‘had any relations at all with members of the other sex — we were each too wrapped up in our own two interwoven lives’.

But it was a stormy affair. They were always having rows about one thing or another.

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Stormy: Tony Crosland (pictured) could be at times sullen and withdrawn, Jenkins wrote

After one of these, Roy wrote of his fear that ‘the great but temperamental Tony, the complex character, the difficult boy, would suddenly erect a facade of sulkiness and refuse to communicate with me.’

He was at home at the time and begged Tony to phone him in Pontypool where ‘I am feeling very desperately the need for your guidance’. He signed off ‘Love, Roy’.

By 1940, events were beginning to pull the two friends apart. With the war hotting up, the 22-year-old Crosland was called up and posted to an Army camp in Cheshire.

He wrote to Roy that ‘I felt rather like bursting into tears when my thoughts turned to some of our happy moments together’. He signed off, ‘Love from a very dismal Tony’.

Thrown in to barracks life with real working-class cockneys, the Left-wing intellectual was bereft, writing to Roy: ‘I’ve never been so miserable in my whole life.’

But he did manage to treat himself to an afternoon’s leave in an expensive hotel, having ‘a beautiful long bath & a glorious tea. It was exactly the sort of afternoon we used to spend so blissfully together.’

He signed off by calling Roy ‘my angel’, an extraordinarily fond endearment, which leaves little doubt of his feelings.

Meanwhile Roy was experiencing something that would split him even further away from Tony — he had met a girl, who was about to transform his life.

It was the beginning of the end for the intimacy he had shared with Crosland, though the growing apart and the ‘break-up’ would take the next three years and be far from easy.

Her name was Jennifer Morris, and she was the daughter of the town clerk of Westminster and a feminist mother who had been one of the first women journalists on the Manchester Guardian.

The same age as Roy, tall, slim, elegant, serious-minded and something of a bluestocking, she was reading history at Cambridge, where she was chairman of the Labour Club. In this capacity she attended a political summer school at Dartington in south Devon.

Admiration: Jenkins (left) confessed Crosland (right as a Labour MP) had managed to seduce him at least once

Couple: Roy Jenkins' numerous affairs failed to destroy his long and lasting marriage to his wife Jennifer

Roy was also there, and a mixed cricket match on the fifth day threw the normally bashful Jenkins and Jennifer together. ‘Inspired by some exhilaration of attraction,’ he recalled, ‘I captained one side, performed unusually well and lost some inhibitions in the flush of victory.’

Did he kiss her? We can never know because what precisely happened was not recorded — only that it involved a gate, because the moment was forever sanctified in their private memory as ‘The Gate at Dartington’. But in that instant, everything in both their lives changed for ever.

Until then, as Jennifer explained later, they were mildly interested but might easily have said goodbye at the end of the course without ever seeing each other ever again.

Then came that ‘miracle’ at the Gate. ‘After that we wanted to spend all possible time together.’

When the summer school ended the next day, they left — she to a fruit-picking camp near Evesham, he home to Pontypool. From Evesham, Jennifer wrote Roy the first letter in what was to become an immense (and immensely revealing)correspondence.

This letter, Roy confessed, he knew almost by heart, ‘because I read it so often in vain searches for any signs of special affection’.

Relaxing: The then-Chancellor Roy Jenkins and his wife between games of tennis at their home in 1970

Even though he knew almost nothing about her, he was so besotted that he made a special trip to London to gaze at the Hampstead house where she grew up.

Over the following weeks they met several times in London, and were caught up in one of the first air-raids. She later visited Roy in Oxford and they both declared their love.

Apart with their families for Christmas, she wrote to ‘my darling Roy’ that she felt ‘intensely happy’. He replied that she was already ‘so much a part of me’ and assured her that ‘I love you too’.

Inevitably, his new romance caused acute jealousy to Tony, who, though away in the Army, sensed the difference in his friend and was soon complaining like a jilted lover.

‘After a very long interval’ he had received just ‘a brief type-written note’, he wrote to Jenkins, and suggested bitterly that ‘the problem of our correspondence will soon solve itself as you will be able to get everything you have to say on the back of a postage-stamp’.

‘I’m increasingly sceptical about how
much there is left to be salvaged from the wreck of our strange bizarre
relationship, attacked as it is so violently on all sides,
but at least I should like to see you before we make up our minds'

- Tony Crosland in a letter to Roy Jenkins

Roy must have owned up to his feelings for Jennifer (or some of them at least) because Crosland now turned nasty. ‘I had not quite realised how far Jennie was leading you on,’ he wrote with heavy sarcasm.

Crosland was now in North Wales, having (to his great relief) been commissioned as an officer, and he suggested Roy might come for a night to his parents’ house in London when he was next on leave.

‘Then, without indulging in any unnecessary recrimination or undesirable introspection, we could see how we got along together, and decide accordingly whether to let the thing [between us] slide completely into oblivion, or whether to try to recapture at least a fraction of our former intimacy.

‘It would at any rate be convenient, to put it no higher, to know where we stood. What do you think? My regards to Jennifer, please.’

Instead, Jenkins invited Crosland to Pontypool for a few days, which Crosland accepted, though he was rather curt in his tone.

‘I’m increasingly sceptical about how much there is left to be salvaged from the wreck of our strange bizarre relationship,’ he wrote, ‘attacked as it is so violently on all sides, but at least I should like to see you before we make up our minds.

‘I still think there’s a chance I may be wrong, though all the evidence points in the other direction. At all events, I’m very much looking forward to seeing you! Much love, Tony.’

The visit evidently reassured Crosland that he had not lost Roy entirely because he signed off his next letter, ‘Very much love, my pet. I have no fears at all for the future.’ There was even stronger lover’s language in his next missive: ‘I am very lonely for you, & longing to be with you again, darling. Very much love, Tony.’

Jogging: Roy Jenkins near his London home. When he was younger he broke off the relationship with Tony Crosland, who still wrote to him: 'Very much love, my pet. I have no fears at all for the future'

But then Crosland came to Oxford at the same time as Jennifer and they met for the first time.

Crosland was in the Red Menace and clearly scared the living daylights out of her on a ‘wildly dangerous drive to Woodstock’.

For the next two years, Roy saw both Jennifer and Tony as often as he could, but Jennifer resented the fact that Roy still felt obliged to see Tony whenever he was on leave, sometimes ahead of her. ‘We are an awkward trio,’ she wrote.

Through all this, Roy and Jennifer continued writing passionate letters assuring one another of their love, but also endlessly analysing their feelings and obsessively exploring the prospect of what they called ‘the BB’ — the ‘Big Break’ — in other words, tiring of each other and breaking up. Jennifer insisted on her need for ‘independence’ and warned him of a possible conflict between his political ambitions and her desire for a career of her own.

As Roy wrote to his wife-to-be assuring her of his love, so did Tony write passionate letters to him

‘I’m not and never will be one of those people who will be satisfied looking after the house,’ she told him. He took umbrage at this, writing back that he was ‘horribly worried’ about their future together. ‘I have an unpleasant fear we shall have increasingly frequent disagreements & minor “scenes”.

‘This doesn’t necessarily mean the end, unless, as is very likely, you begin to think that the whole thing is hardly worth while.’

But Jennifer replied that their last row had been a healthy sign, not a precursor of ‘BB’.

It showed how ‘acutely miserable we could make each other and made us realise that we couldn’t do without each other.

‘All I want is that we should be a complete unity.’

But Tony, it seems, had not yet given up the fight. ‘I love you still very much,’ he wrote to Roy, recalling happy times out in the Red Menace in terms reminiscent of Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited.

Do you remember, Tony pleaded, ‘a day in Pangbourne when we had tea almost alone in a rather palatial hotel? Or lying in the grass by a ruined abbey just near Burford?’

Tony was confident that ‘for all its turbulent history, the old- established and well-known firm of Crosland and Jenkins is still united by bonds as strong and close as ever. Very much love, Tony.’

Yet Roy was spending almost all that summer with Jennifer, a golden four months to which they later both looked back longingly as, in her words, ‘the most marvellous and most perfect and most exciting time I’ve ever had’.

Comparing their relationship with those of a number of her girlfriends, she was sure that their love was fiercer and more absorbing than any of her friends’. ‘We reach more perfect peaks than they do.’

It was now 1942 and Jenkins — having got his First at Oxford — was kicking his heels at home in Pontypool, waiting to be called up into the Army.

For a while he had been nicknaming Jennifer ‘giraffe’ (she called him ‘jaguar’) and he wrote of his ‘terrible shock at not having my giraffe bobbing up & down at my side — which means more to me than anything else in the world.’

Hard to get: Crosland realised there was no way he would get Roy (pictured) back, so wrote to Roy's parents

Crosland soon came to realise there was no way he was going to get Roy back, and he poured out his heart in a letter to Roy’s parents, to whom he had become close over the years.

‘Roy came under the spell of the first nice girl he met,’ he explained, ‘which was a revolutionary break in our friendship since he omitted to mention the matter at all to me, although we were corresponding regularly. This I was not easily able either to forget or forgive.

‘I was both jealous and bitter, and despite two or three visits to Pontypool we were never able to re-introduce any genuine harmony into our relationship.’

But he was reconciled to the situation. ‘Many of the high hopes are gone, many bold gay plans for the future are dead, and somewhere a spark has been put out.

‘But it may well be that the new state of affairs is more healthy than the old.

‘We shall become two normal people on conventionally friendly terms.’

Roy and Jennifer married in January 1945. Crosland was still on active service overseas and could not get home for the wedding, but he wrote that he was ‘very glad’ for them.

‘Tell Jennifer from me that I naturally think her lucky to marry the best friend I ever had. Wasn’t that nicely said? Love, Tony.’

Water under the bridge: While Crosland went through a wild period - marrying then having a string of glamorous girlfriends - Jenkins (pictured with his wife) was more stable, despite his affairs

Seven years later, Crosland himself married, probably in an effort to shake off his youthful homosexuality. It ended in divorce and he fell into a wild period when he went through a string of glamorous girlfriends before he married a new wife and settled down.

Like Jenkins, he became a successful Labour politician. As Education Secretary, President of the Board of Trade, Local Government Secretary and Foreign Secretary, his list of high positions rivalled ( but never quite matched) Jenkins’s.

Roy and Tony did eventually manage to have a more normal pattern of friendship — but it was never entirely easy, given how close they had once been.

And it was never forgotten. In his acclaimed biography of Gladstone, Jenkins wrote about the Victorian prime minister’s youthful friendship with the poet Arthur Hallam and ‘the electricity of infatuation and jealousy between them’.

He cannot have failed to have had in mind memories of his own intense undergraduate relationship with Tony Crosland.